KENDAL.- Abbot Hall’s main summer exhibition in 2015 looks at five key members of the “second generation” of artists active in St Ives, and at the development of their art during the course of the 1950s. The five, who were nearly contemporaries, all knew each other and, in different configurations, all exhibited together at various points of their careers, and posthumously, are Terry Frost, Roger Hilton, Patrick Heron, Peter Lanyon and Bryan Wynter. All were artists who moved towards abstraction but, for the most part, artists whose works would fit Heron’s phrase of “abstract figuration”, rather than pure abstraction – the titles of their works often keep a sometimes tenuous link with places and objects, although sometimes their abstractions are tied to observable reality only by their titles.

Terry Frost was the only one of the five who didn’t go to art college after leaving school. His first experience of abstract art, arguably, came when, as a manual labourer at the Armstrong Whitworth aircraft factory in Coventry, he painted the RAF’s red, white and blue roundels onto fighter airplanes. During the war he was a commando and was captured on Crete in 1941, spending the rest of the war as a prisoner. He later said of Stalag 383, in Bavaria, “prison camp was my university”. It was there that he met Adrian Heath, a former student of the Slade school of art, who encouraged him to start painting, using stolen horsehairs for brushes, and mixing the oil from sardine tins with pigment to make paint. With Heath’s help, at the end of the war he started studying art at Camberwell school of art, and, in 1946, he moved to St Ives. Victor Pasmore, a tutor Camberwell, encouraged him to experiment with abstraction, and in 1949, in response to a poem by WH Auden, produced “Madrigal”, a largely abstract geometric composition. In several works from the early 50s, the paintings’ main focus is on a series of semi-circular forms, which the artist said were derived from the rocking motions of the hulls of the fishing boats in St Ives harbour.

Like Frost, Roger Hilton served during the war as a commando, and he too was captured – during the Dieppe Raid of 1942 - and spent nearly three years as a prisoner. Unlike Frost, Hilton trained as an artist immediately on leaving school, studying at the Slade and at the Académie Ranson in Paris. Like Frost, he was inspired by Pasmore’s example to experiment with abstraction. Throughout the 50s his work was almost entirely abstract, some suggesting the female figure and the landscape, but others were more uncompromisingly detached from figuration, showing the influence of Malevich’s squares, and of Mondrian. He wrote “the abstract artist submits himself entirely to the unknown … he is like a man swinging out into the void.” Later, in the 1960s, he returned to a predominantly figurative style, creating exuberant vividly coloured female figures clearly influenced by Mattise’s dance paintings.

Patrick Heron spent the war as a conscientious objector, latterly working as a journeyman potter at the Leach Pottery in St Ives. As a child he had spent four years in Newlyn and St Ives, including a winter when his family borrowed Eagles Nest, on the Zennor cliffs, which he was much later able to buy and move into in 1956 – he said of the house that it was “very nearly the greatest passion of my life” and “I had to accept that the colours, shapes and forms of the garden had moved me.” The move to Eagles Nest coincided with – and arguably caused – Heron’s shift from a cubist form of figuration to full abstraction. In January 1957, after less than a year at Eagles Nest, he wrote: "the pictures I have painted since last January have much in common with my figurative paintings: but they lack the linear grid of figurative drawing. This has freed me to deal more directly and inventively … with every single aspect of the painting that is purely pictorial, i.e. the architecture of the canvas, the spatial interrelation of each and every touch (or stroke, or bar) of colour, the colour-character, the paint-character of a painting - all these I now explore with a sense of freedom quite denied me while I had to keep half an eye on a ‘subject'.”

Peter Lanyon was the only Cornish born of the five artists. In 1957 he was the first of the five to exhibit in New York. It was on that visit that he first met and became friends with Rothko, encouraging the latter to visit St Ives two years later, where he was feted by the arts community, danced on Zennor moor at midnight and formed a lasting attachment to the place and many of its people – he apparently wept when he heard of Lanyon’s death, and, on meeting Heron in 1965, the first question he asked was “what’s going on in St Ives?” Lanyon started his first “weather” painting in March 1957, immediately on his return from New York. He wrote: "After a year of elimination, I produced 'The Silent Coast' [1957] which became the first of many weather paintings and led to the later paintings of air rather than shore or coast." He added that he was especially inspired by "... those days when after stormy weather one gets an extreme silence and restfulness round the coast of West Penwith." In the late 1950s, he fulfilled a long-held ambition to take up flying – he had served as a mechanic in the RAF during the war, but for medical reasons had not been allowed to become a pilot. The experience of gliding over Cornwall hugely influenced his later works which, although highly abstract, also clearly allude to his experiences in the air – as his earlier abstractions contain stylized variations on the Cornish cliffs and coves. He was killed crash-landing his glider in a headwind in 1964.

Bryan Wynter, who was a contemporary of Heron’s at the Slade, like him spent the war as a conscientious objector. He moved to Zennor immediately after the war, remaining in the area for the rest of his life. He initially blended linear, stylized depictions of the Cornish landscape with cubist forms and configurations, moving later in the decade to purely abstract almost calligraphic tachiste works inspired, according to the artist, by Braque's late Atelier series - although he maintained that the local landscape remained critical to his output, writing: “the landscape I live among is bare of houses, trees, people; is dominated by winds, by swift changes of weather, by moods of the sea ... These elemental forces enter the painting and lend their qualities without becoming motifs.”

The landscape of Cornwall was something that inspired all of these artists. Patrick Heron was an active conservationist, preserving the unique salt-resistant gardens at Eagles Nest, but also helping protect the wider landscape: when in the eary1960s the Ministry of Defense proposed taking over Zennor moor and its headland, he and Bryan Wynter organized successful opposition to the scheme, attracting support from a dazzling array of artistic talent, including Benjamin Brittan, Henry Moore, John Betjeman and Dame Edith Evans, as well as from the St Ives artists.

The five artists had much in common with each other while maintaining their entirely distinctive individual styles. Interesting overlaps occur – all but Bryan Wynter exhibited in Patrick Heron’s “Space in Colour” exhibition at the Hanover Gallery in 1953; all but Peter Lanyon were in “Four Middle Generation Artists” at Waddington’s in 1959; Wynter, Frost and Lanyon taught at Bath school of art, Wynter, Heron and Hilton studied at the Slade; all except Heron were included in the British Council’s “British Painting 1900-62” exhibition in eastern Europe in 1964-5 and so on.

During the 1950s, all five artists, in very separate ways, went through strangely similar journeys towards their own personal forms of “abstract figuration”. All will have agreed with Rothko’s statement that “the subject is crucial”, although some might not have gone as far as he did when he added “and only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless.” All will also probably have agreed with Patrick Heron, when he wrote in the catalogue essay for “Space in Colour” “Tonal colour is thus the sole means of bestowing that physical vibrancy and resonance without which no picture is alive. And this vibration can be conveyed in 'hueless colours' - that is in blacks, whites and greys - no less than by the full chromatic range.”